Wellframe2012–2016

Wellframe is a Boston-based company that partners with leading health plans and healthcare providers to build an improved infrastructure for care delivery by combining clinical medicine and new technologies.

Personalized clinical care plans are delivered in the form of an interactive daily health checklist that patients complete on their mobile device. It offers daily guidance, medication reminders, customized multimedia content, physical activity tracking, as well as a direct connection to their medical team for continuous support. The medical team monitors progress and acts upon exchanges through a secure web dashboard where they can send personal messages, manage the patient’s health and get actionable alerts on high-risk cases while keeping track of a substantial population of patients.

I began as the sole designer since the early stages of the startup of 4 co-founders and helped in its growth to a 30+ employees company over a few years. That involved working closely with clinical, engineering, sales teams, and users, pushing forward the UX & UI design of both the mobile app (iOS and Android) and web dashboard, producing marketing & promotional materials, and much more.

Working on products that literally affect lives of people is very challenging but also rewarding and invaluable.

Roles

Evolution of the Wellframe app from the original version on the far left, to the subsequent iterations that I worked on.

The Wellframe patient-facing mobile app is available on both iOS & Android, and requires a special access code that the users obtain from their Care Team or health program. The app itself started as a basic to-do list customized to the user’s specific health condition. At the time the core features included a pedometer to track patient’s physical activity, one-way messaging and minimal medication reminders. It eventually grew to have many additional features like two-way messaging, advanced medication management & reminders, health & wellness tracking, and a whole informative multimedia content library among other things.

The main challenge across the product’s development was to always consider the diverse demographics of the userbase, which could easily range from young teenagers to older generations. Therefore accessibility and familiarity with technology was a major factor in designing the interface and experience. Simple things that are maybe obvious to technology-literate people might not be so intuitive to an elder person using a smartphone for the first time, as we quickly found out through user tests. Hence the onboarding among other things needed to be as clear and instructive as possible and basic interactions driven to their most visually pronounced and intuitive denominator.

In order to add warmth and a more personal touch to an otherwise strictly functional application, I introduced the idea of the app having a ‘voice’ or personality that would act like an assistant between the user and the Care Team, and that was the Wellframe entity. It would guide the user through the process of onboarding & registering, and give information or tips while using different features of the app. An interactive prototype of the onboarding process can be explored below: